FBI agents storm out from Senate hearing to avoid testifying on Insider Threat program

​It’s been two-and-a-half years since the United States government unveiled an insider threat program to keep classified networks and sensitive intelligence secure, but the officials in charge would literally rather storm away than speak about it.

From the floor of Congress last Thursday, US Senator Chuck
Grassley (R-Iowa) acknowledged that the interagency Insider
Threat Task Force established in 2012 “for deterring,
detecting and mitigating” future potential risks “was
intended to train federal employees to watch out for insider
threats among their colleagues.” But media reports in the
years and months since, as the senator put it, have suggested
“that this program might not do enough to distinguish between
true insider threats and legitimate whistleblowers.”

Indeed, a McClatchy News report on the program published last summer
called the initiative into question and suggested that federal
employees all but spy on their own colleagues for displaying any
behavior that could even be considered remotely suspicious.
Grassley said allegations about the efficiency of the program
prompted him to request details from the Department of Justice,
but months of waiting anxiously for answers from the feds came to
a head earlier this April with the official in charge sneaking
out of the Senate in the middle of the highly anticipated
hearing.

Grassley said last Thursday that he asked the Federal
Bureau of Information for Insider Threat Program training
materials four months ago, but was told to schedule a hearing
instead to have his questions answered. That event was eventually
scheduled for the week prior to last Thursday’s comments, but
Grassley now says that not only did the FBI fail to bring the
materials he requested to that hearing, but that his attempts to
ask the bureau for details directly from the officials in charge
of the program quickly fell apart after mere minutes.

“Unfortunately, neither my staff nor Chairman Leahy’s staff
was able to learn more, because only about ten minutes into the
briefing, the FBI abruptly walked out,” Grassley said.
“FBI officials simply refused to discuss any whistleblower
implications in its Insider Threat Program and left the room.
These are clearly not the actions of an agency that is genuinely
open to whistleblowers or whistleblower protection.”

Indeed, one of the only details he was able to divulge from the
director of the Insider Threat Program was a bizarre attempt at
reassuring Sen. Grassley that federal whistleblowers are,
contrary to his concerns, able to speak up about alleged
government malfeasance without fearing they’d be treated as an
insider threat or, as WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning found out,
sentenced to decades in prison for publishing state secrets.

According to Grassley, the head of the Insider Threat Program
told the staff at the Senate hearing earlier this month ahead of
his spontaneous exit “that there was no need to worry about
whistleblower communications.”

“He said whistleblowers had to register in order to be
protected, and the Insider Threat Program would know to just
avoid those people,” Grassley recalled.

“Now I have never heard of whistleblowers being required to
‘register’ in order to be protected,” Grassley said during
the most recent Senate hearing. “The idea of such a
requirement should be pretty alarming to all Americans. Sometimes
confidentiality is the best protection a whistleblower has.”

One of the latest intelligence leakers to serve as a thorn in the
side of the Obama administration has been Edward Snowden,
the former government contractor who last year started sharing
classified documents about the US National Security Agency with
the media. And as he’s insisted several times since, the
whistleblower protections authorized by the president and touted
by the White House would have done nothing to aid him had he
chosen another way of exposing the NSA’s wrongdoings.

"Returning to the US, I think, is the best resolution for the
government, the public, and myself, but it’s unfortunately not
possible in the face of current whistleblower protection laws,
which through a failure in law did not cover national security
contractors like myself,” Snowden said during an online question-and-answer
session last year.

"One of the things that has not been widely reported by
journalists is that whistleblower protection laws in the US do
not protect contractors in the national security arena. There are
so many holes in the laws, the protections they afford are so
weak, and the processes for reporting they provide are so
ineffective that they appear to be intended to discourage
reporting of even the clearest wrongdoing. If I had revealed what
I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to
Congress, they could have charged me with a felony,” he
added.

Speaking last week before the Senate, Grassley said that the
intelligence community has to confront the “issue of
distinguishing a true insider threat from a legitimate
whistleblower.”

“This issue could be impacted by both the House- and
Senate-passed versions of the intelligence authorization,”
he added, either of which includes language that would allow the
government to continuously monitor security clearance holders. No
matter which way the administration goes, however, Grassley said
that “we have to balance detecting insider threats with
letting whistleblowers know that their legitimate whistleblower
communications are protected.”

“Those that fight waste, fraud, and abuse in government
should be lauded for their patriotism,” he said.

An executive order signed by President Barack
Obama in October 2011 mandated that the government establish an
interagency Insider Threat Task Force “for deterring,
detecting and mitigating” future potential risks like the
one posed a year earlier by Chelsea Manning — a US Army
intelligence analyst who downloaded a trove of sensitive
documents and shared them with the anti-secrecy website
WikiLeaks. When McClatchy News came into possession of internal
documents last summer, however, they wrote a report calling into
question the ability of the program to do as promised.

“Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how
some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized
disclosures of any information, not just classified
material,” their report read. “They also show how
millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for
high-risk persons or behaviors among co-workers and could face
penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report
them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.”
Elsewhere, documents seen by McClatchy reports suggested that
some government agencies consider “certain life
experiences,” including stress, divorce, financial problems
or frustrations with a coworker as being able to “turn a
trusted user into an insider threat.”